Planet-im.com

My blog is now aggregated on planet-im.com, so “Hello Planet IM”, and many thanks to Christian Hammond for making this happen in less than 5 minutes after I sent my request to him

Ashamed by my country

Today I felt very ashamed by Morocco when I discovered that they voted yes to Open XML, I sent them 2 mails asking for more information concerning this and without any answer, I can smell the bribes and money from here, and I cannot express how mad I feel.

Post GUADEC

This year GUADEC was in Birmingham, UK, the GUADEC itself was great, I managed to meet a lot of people and friends, and do a lot of hacking on pymsn and telepathy-butterfly. What I didn’t really enjoy was the considerable amount of security cameras in the UK … that just drives me nut, how can people there be able to live with the fact that they are constantly being spied on ? And of course I have asked few people from UK, and the general answer I got is that it is needed for security …

The other thing that I didn’t really enjoy, was the amount of questions I got asked at the airport ! It seems to be perfectly alright nowadays to harass people holding an arabic name, having a dark skin and wearing a black beard with a load of questions and treat them as potentially bad people.

Anyway, enough bashing, I am now looking forward for the next guadec in Istanbul, that one for sure will be in an interesting place

SwitchboardManager

A week ago, ole andré started some very serious msnp2p reverse engineering. msnp2p is what MSN uses to transfer all sort of data, like display pictures, custom smiley or files… that msnp2p crack, may use the switchboard, which is a relay server used for sending messages between you and the peers your are talking to, the problem with the switchboards, is that they are very complex to handle : timeouts, peers may leave and you need to re invite them, peers may go offline… The complexity of the situation led me to design a new object named SwitchboardManager, that I just pushed yesterday into pymsn.devel (http://projects.collabora.co.uk/bzr/telepathy/pymsn.devel/), this new object, as its name suggests, is supposed to hide the Switchboard management complexity from the facade classes I hope this will help enhancing our implementations

pymsn development

As many of you may have noticed, the development of the rewrite branch has slowed down recently, the reason is simply the lack of a testing client, so I decided to tackle the problem and creating a small testing client, here is the screenshot of the day then :

As always, you can grab both pymsn.rewrite and flutterby using bzr:

bzr get http://projects.collabora.co.uk/bzr/telepathy/pymsn.devel/
bzr get http://projects.collabora.co.uk/~asabil/bzr/flutterby/

Enjoy

DirectShowVideoSrc for gstreamer

Ole André and Me, have been working on implementing a DirectShow video source for gstreamer, here is an initial screenshot showing that crack working!

Aren’t we cute

Hopefully, we will be able to release a fully functionnal gstreamer directshow video source element by the end of this week

Oslo

I have been in Oslo, for almost a week now, I really enjoy this city, and its people ! And although I miss India, and the people I met in India so much, I love this place, and I really have a good time working here for Tandberg

Concerning pymsn, and butterfly, I think we will manage to hack on it, to get a release ready, Ole André and me ! Hopefully, before the end of the next week.

bling : a small shader library

Hello all,

I just wrote a small shading library, that abstracts the complexity of loading and using shader behind some nice GObject classes   This is just a toy library for now, I hope it will get useful, and extended.

For now it doesn’t do anything fancy,it just load ARB_*_program shaders if you graphic card supports them, and also GLSL shaders if your card supports them.

You can grab a tarball with all the code from here :  bling.tar.bz2

Enjoy !

pymsn & telepathy-butterfly : finally a new release

Ouf, I finally managed to make a bugfix release for pymsn and telepathy-butterfly… finally…

pymsn is here: pymsn-0.2.2
and telepathy butterfly is here: telepathy-butterfly-0.1.4

The pymsn release is from the stable branch, so it doesn’t include the new funky MSNP15 protocol with ugly SOAP in it… I hope the next version of pymsn will be from the rewrite branch !

Evince PostScript backend

Yesterday at 10:00pm I decided that it was about time to start working on a project that I am supposed to finish by April 13th. The project consists of finding a way to implement text search and selection in a PostScript document viewer. I then checked out Evince from the gnome svn tree, and started checking its code,  in order to try to implement those features in my favorite document viewer.

First I tried to make the current PostScript backend prepend a text extraction prologue to all PostScript documents it open, to override the /show /kshow …. operators, and make them spit out some informations about the position of the glyphs and their value. The idea seemed okay, but in fact it was quite heavy, and overblown… I had to think about something simpler, and still powerful.

The idea of using ghostscript pdfwrite output device to generate a pdf stream out of a PS file and send it directly to poppler for the rendering came then to my mind. The nice part about it, is that we can inherit all the nice and cool features of the PDF implementation in Evince.

I started hacking yesterday at around 11:30, and today at 15:00 I had a fully functionnal PostScript backend implementation that can let you select text, copy it, search for text and display pages thumbnails

During this short project, I felt in love with Evince architecture. Evince is for sure a very well designed software.